Tag Brazilian Politics

Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff must wonder sometimes that with friends like her predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who needs enemies.

Tensions between Ms Rousseff, a taciturn technocrat, and Mr Lula da Silva, a charismatic populist, have begun to take the twists and turns of one of Brazil’s sprawling telenovela soap operas, in which close friends and family often stab each other in the back.

For Ms Rousseff, who is facing the possibility of impeachment by an opposition emboldened by her growing unpopularity, the enemy within is the last thing she needs. For Latin America’s largest economy, which is sinking into its deepest recession since the 1930s, ruling party infighting will sap investor confidence only further.

Regardless of how outlandish the claim is, the finance minister is winning over traders in the credit market.

Since April, when lawmakers began debating Levy’s belt-tightening measures, Brazil’s perceived creditworthiness has improved faster than its regional peers as he persuades a divided Congress to approve spending cuts and tax increases.

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IN HIS presidential bid Eduardo Campos, the former governor of Pernambuco, set out to break the mould of Brazilian politics, polarised between the ruling left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) of President Dilma Rousseff and the centre-right Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), the main opposition. By cruel irony, Mr Campos’s untimely death in a plane crash on August 13th may have improved the chances of a “third way” in October’s election.

A poll by Datafolha taken after the tragedy and published on August 18th gave Mr Campos’s running-mate, Marina Silva, more than double his most recent showing (see chart). On August 20th Campos’s centrist Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) duly blessed Ms Silva as his replacement, naming Beto Albuquerque, one of its congressmen, as her running mate.

Ms Silva is better known than Mr Campos was, thanks to her run at the presidency as a protest candidate in 2010, when she came third with nearly 20m votes. A daughter of poor rubber-tappers in the Amazon region, she is a founder of Brazil’s environmental movement as well as of the PT. She served as environment minister under Ms Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, until resigning in 2008 over ungreen development projects pursued by other ministries.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was endorsed by Lula in 2010, kept silent on the ultimately victorious candidacy of Maduro, the hand-chosen heir of the late leftist Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez.

The difference in demeanor between the two Brazilian presidents was not surprising to Rousseff watchers. Since assuming office at the start of 2011, she has taken a much more muted approach to foreign policy than Lula, avoiding the type of activism that often annoyed the United States.

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The YouTube video of Marcos Feliciano, a Brazilian evangelical pastor and federal congressman, would be funny were it not so tragic.

In it, the preacher derides a member of his congregation for giving him a credit card without the PIN number during collection time.

“This is the last time I’ll say it, Samuel de Souza gave his card but not the password. That doesn’t count,” he scowls, as other brethren hand in checks for 500 to 1,000 real ($250 to $500) and even a motorbike.

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She’s one of the world’s most popular presidents with an approval rating that is the envy of her peers in richer countries struggling with debt crises and political deadlock – 79 percent and rising.

She presides over a country with record-low unemployment, a can-do optimism that invites comparisons to the post-war years in the United States, and a chance to showcase its progress when it hosts the soccer World Cup next year.

And yet, it’s entirely possible that Dilma Rousseff could fail to win re-election as president of Brazil in October 2014.

The 65-year-old leftist remains the clear favorite but the threat of rising inflation and unemployment, a trio of attractive opposition candidates, and the possibility of an embarrassing logistical debacle at the World Cup mean that Rousseff is less of a shoo-in than many observers think.

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There is plenty of blame to be shared for Brazil’s troubled political scenario. But for Marco Feliciano, the country’s human rights boss, it’s all the devil’s fault. At least that’s what he said during a religious gathering this past weekend in a small town in southeast Brazil, when talking about his predecessors–”They were dominated by Satan,” he reportedly told the audience, later explaining that by ‘Satan’ he “just meant his opponents.”

Feliciano is, of course, the ‘racist’ evangelical-preacher-turned-political leader whose most famous remarks include his depreciation of the opposite sex (“If women achieve gender equality, the traditional family will collapse and society will become gay”), African descendants (“They were cursed by Noah. That’s a fact”) and gays (“Salvation is available to them in the form a gay ‘cure’). He is also under investigation for embezzlement and homophobia. In spite of his controversial resumé, Feliciano was recently-elected president of Brazil’s House of Representatives Human Rights and Minorities Commission, creating, as one would expect, a national uproar.

Although his ascendance to the job was fairly constitutional, since he was democratically elected as a representative with tens of thousands of votes, and therefore represents the people (or a part of the people, as the rule goes in a democracy) to preside over the commission, apparently none of the representatives who chose him as a human rights defender thought of researching his views on the aforementioned topics, consequently avoiding the stir. And, most importantly, nobody cared if he had the credentials for the office he now holds. Why not? Because it simply doesn’t matter.